Memory of Water’ dysfunction wearying

Sunday

Feb 3, 2013 at 6:00 AMFeb 3, 2013 at 6:59 AM

By Paul Kolas Telegram & Gazette REVIEWER

It’s not easy to like, to laugh at, or be moved by Shelagh Stephenson’s “The Memory of Water.”

The title refers to a homeopathic theory that water retains the effects of healing elixirs long after they’ve been washed away, as if stored in memory. It’s a metaphor that Stephenson attaches with heavy-handed symbolism to her dark comedy of three dysfunctional sisters preparing for their mother’s funeral.

Flipping capriciously back and forth from comic profanity to bickering reproach and recrimination, “The Memory of Water” seems as unsure of what it wants to be as its characters want to do with their lives. It’s full of the whiny familiarity of “you were mother’s favorite” sibling rivalry that can wear an audience down after two-and-a-half hours.

What made Worcester County Light Opera Company’s production on Friday night a worthy effort was its fine cast, which was as tightly knit as the people they were playing were in emotional disarray. Teresa (Linda Oroszko) is the oldest sister. She and her husband Frank (Joey Andrade) run a health food supplement store.

Teresa prides herself on having whittled down a personals field of 47 candidates to find the perfect mate in Frank, unlike her footloose and fancy-free youngest sister, Catherine (Caitlin Lahey), who’s been to bed with 78 men and is anxious for a phone call from her latest true love, Javier. The middle sister, Mary (Jo Ann Savage), is a doctor trying to steer her five-year affair with a married doctor, Mike (Ed Savage), into more serious territory. Mike, whose wife has chronic fatigue syndrome, or so he says, even though Mary has seen a picture of her in a magazine that shows her in perfect health, is content to keep things the way they are. Mary is treating a patient, a 25-year old man in a coma, with a devotion that eventually becomes revealed to us as compensation for a long-ago regret. Unlike her sisters, she also has encounters with Vi (Christina Pierro), her mother’s ghost.

Whenever Pierro’s Vi gracefully floats onstage, Victor Kruczynski’s lighting artfully dims over Mark Goodney’s lavishly upholstered bedroom set, much like the sisters’ dimmed memories of what really transpired while they were growing up. Draped in costume designer Jeff Garceau’s shimmering white dress, Pierro looks as if she has stepped right out of a Noel Coward play into an alien environment. Her elocution is as polished as her visual flair. It’s hard to imagine this woman giving birth to the three daughters who confront each other with such plebeian rants Maybe that’s a deliberate way of telling the audience, “I wasn’t such a good mother after all” — a wistful regret given poignant closure by Pierro and Jo Ann Savage late in the second act. Vi compares her Alzheimer’s disease to “being adrift among a series of islands of your own identity,” a reflection that Pierro imparts with pristine pathos.

Because Mary is a doctor, and the most successful of her sisters, Jo Ann Savage deftly balances Mary’s self-indulgent attitude of entitlement with the pain of feeling unsupported by her mother at a time of great need. Having the real-life husband and wife Savages play opposite each other adds an extra measure of veracity to Mary and Mike’s troubled relationship.

Also taking on the duty of director, Ed Savage imparts Mike with an easy-going charm that nicely deflects Mary’s when-are-you going-to-divorce-your-wife impatience.

Of all the self-absorbed behavior going around, the best and funniest of it is delivered by Lahey’s motor-mouthed, pot-smoking Catherine, whose limited attention span takes her from one topic to another with breathless semi-coherence. In Catherine’s insatiable quest for attention, Lahey goes from giggles to tears with tottering virtuosity.

Oroszko convincingly reveals the unhappiness hiding behind Teresa’s bossy facade. She feels resentment at having to do the heavy lifting for the funeral arrangements and for keeping the unsteady family foundation from toppling. That is, until she gets drunk and grandly lets loose on everyone, including Frank, after he confesses he’s sick and tired of the health food B.S. and he wants to open a pub.

Frank is probably the most rational character in the play — the one who can step back and see how crazy these people are, advising Mike to escape while he can. Andrade gives a hugely likeable performance, one both critical and sympathetic.

When the sisters toss their dysfunctional squabbles momentarily aside to try on their mother’s dresses, deciding what to keep and throw out, the burst of happy spontaneity that follows almost makes up for the disproportionately shrill and wearying argument and regret surrounding it. That, and Lahey’s bubbly loon of a Catherine. Almost.